QuerKlang ® - experimental composing at school

What does it sound like if school children compose in the context of the classroom?

The QuerKlang project, which launched in 2003, enabled around 800 pupils to engage in designing and creating experimental music processes. Trained and accompanied by composers, music teachers and students of music at the Universität der Künste Berlin, the students develop their own compositions which are then performed in the context of the Maerz Musik festival.

In school music lessons there is not typically much time spent covering new and contemporary music and only very few selected works and composers are discussed. Following this approach to experimental music the traditional music education in schools almost completely disregards the fact that contemporary music can be a personal form of expression available even for non-professional musicians and young pupils. This often leads to a lack of tolerance and wide-spread ignorance about how diverse contemporary music can actually be.

QuerKlang aims to remedy such a tendency of avoidance of experimental music by encouraging pupils to explore and experiment with musical material and to create their own compositions. QuerKlang is not only about activating curiosity and openness towards uncommon and unusual musical material in terms of enhancing musical knowledge, but it also deals with creating a basic understanding of how the process of composing actually works, i.e.:

How does one create a musical structure?

What must one pay attention to?

What makes a composition “good” or “worth listening to”?

The pupils perceive themselves as composers who - apart from judging music as either “beautiful” or “ugly” - invent, evaluate and modify musical processes and eventually perform them in public concerts.